Organizations often manage their computer security policies from a central location, typically employing a single computer server to manage the security polices on networked user (client) computers. The clients poll the server several times a day to check for, and optionally download, updated security policies and to upload their status to the server. Assuming a client and the server exchange a large amount of data several times a day, the data traffic between the server and even a small number clients can cause significant degradation for overall network communications.